WAHOO HANGING ON
Wahoo McDaniel is alive, but not well. Sports Illustrated found
the legendary pro wrestler for its annual "Where are they now?"
July 2 edition.
Now 63 and raising his 12-year-old son Zac by himself, McDaniel
sits in his Charlotte, N.C., home in limbo awaiting a kidney
transplant.
It's not like I'm flopping around in the house getting ready to
die," he told SI writer Mike Shropshire. His goal is to see
his young son grow into a man. Instead of daily dialysis
treatments, he hopes he can hunt, fish and golf every day as
he did after retiring from the ring in 1995 and before his
health took a turn.
Those wishes depend on getting a transplant. While his life
is in a holding pattern now, the bulk of his years were spent
no-holds-barred. No Hollywood writer could possibly conjure
up a character as colorful as Wahoo McDaniel.
As a boy, his Pony League baseball coach was a Texas oilman
named George Herbert Walker Bush. He was one of the best shot
and discus men in high school in Midland, Texas, and coupled
with his remarkable speed and agility, many thought he could
have been the next Jim Thorpe. However, a refusal to learn
the pole vault kept him from being a decathlete.
He starred on the defensive line of the great Oklahoma football
teams of the late 1950s. On a bet, McDaniel won $185 for running
36 miles in six hours without stopping; then on another bet he
downed a few tablespoons of motor oil.
In 1960 he started for the AFL champion Houston Oilers as a
220-pound offensive lineman. He later shifted to linebacker and
was a good friend and teammate of Joe Namath of the New York
Jets.
He started wrestling to supplement his NFL salary, but by his
retirement in 1969, his football salary was simply tipping
money for this wrestling career.
Known for his lethal knife-edge chops, he had famous blood
feuds with Ric Flair, Stan Hansen, Harley Race, the Andersons
and Sgt. Slaughter, often involving his favorite weapon: the
Indian strap.
A man in Atlanta once jumped him with a baseball bat, but he
pistol whipped the attacker and in the process accidentally
had the gun go off and the bullet hit the thigh of Dirty Dick
Slater.
"I had to pay Dick's salary for six weeks," he said. He was
married five times to four women, and although he looks like
Thorpe, he has more German blood than Native American in him.
He wrestled more than 10,000 matches and took almost 3,000
stitches in his career. "People can believe what they want,
but what I experienced in the ring was as tough or tougher
than anything I encountered on a football field," he said.
Right now he's in a battle for his life. Here's hoping Wahoo
McDaniel gets the decision and can add more stories to his
already unbelievable life.
